THI-: crow's cousins. 27 



show a beak east of the Museum Road or south of the Creek. 

 Doves they ij^iiored, and the smaller sini^ing birds, sparrows, 

 etc., were gladly tolerated for the tit-bits they provided. 



Common enough in the wooded portions of the Shang- 

 hai Settlement as well as in all the country round is a verj' 

 pretty cousin to the magpie. He is usuall}' called the blue 

 jay by local sportsmen but he is really a magpie bearing the 

 descriptive title of the azure-winged ( Cyaiiopica coda, or 

 Cyanopoliiis cyaneus). He is a very charming bird in many 

 ways. In colour he shows a black, jockej-capped head and 

 for the rest a delightful combination of grey and blue, wings 

 and tail especially showing the azure tint. He lives, and 

 moves and has his being in little parties of eight or ten 

 perhaps, and is never seen far from trees, though a large 

 portion of his food is found on the ground. He is a great 

 chatterer, and it Is quite evident that his companions under- 

 stand every call he gives. 



A still more beautiful species of an allied family is the 

 red-billed blue magpie. He is by far the most beautiful of 

 all the magpie family with which we are acquainted in this 

 part of the world. His beak and feet are red: he has a glossy 

 black head and neck, with a crest of speckled white, his belly 

 is white, or whitish grey, his wings blue, and his tail, of which 

 the two central feathers are nearly twice as long as those of 

 thecommon magpie, isof barred black and white, all so charm- 

 ingly combined as to make him a vision of supreme delight. 

 I shall never forget my first sight of this beautiful creature 

 in the next province of Chekiang many, many years ago. As 

 Mr. Styan has said of him, he is a noisy bird, fond of letting his 

 friends know where he is — there are always parties of 

 them, a precaution which in wooded districts may be nec- 

 essary to prevent straying. The nearest district to Shanghai 

 where I personally have met Urocissa Sinensis, as he is called, 

 is the country between Kashing and Hangchow. There, in the 

 early 'seventies', there used to be a fairly large stretch of 

 country very sparsely populated, and in some partsquite waste. 

 It had not recovered from the despoilment which it received 

 alternately from the Taipings and their Imperialist foes. It was 

 known to sporting men generallj' as "The Plain", and there, 

 thanks to the semi-jungle of the neighbourhood, wild life 

 was as plentiful as it Vv-as varied. Pheasants by the thousand, 

 partridges, quail, ducks, teal, snipe and woodcock, deer, and 

 almost everything else in the form of shootable beast and bird 

 which Kiangsu provides, were to be found for the search. Pos- 

 sibly it was due to the nature of the country at that time that, 

 once there, one seemed to be in another avian world. Birds 

 were then seen, and I believe are still sometimes, which are 

 rarely, if ever, found in the neighbourhood of the Settlement, 



